Marshall: This veteran of 25 years' programming agrees with you.
And, it's not just COBOL. All programming languages have the problem.
Most of the tools attack the COBOL language because it's the language
that runs 80%(+) of the business systems that keep companys afloat.
It's relatively easy to determine where the Year 2000 impacts a single
program ... just scan the code.
The real problem is how to determine how a change in one program will
affect another program, which in turn affects another program (or 2,
or 3, or ...) and how in the heck to sequence the changes in all the
programs without affecting the production work. Tain't easy! And, if
you expand the length of a record to include the century digit(s),
you also impact software components external to the code, such as Job
Control Language (JCL).
Code Analysis tools help to find the impacted areas, change automation
tools help to speed up the mundane physical change activity (with
significant risk, I might add), but there's nothing yet to help the
poor guy who's responsible for it all ... namely the Project Manager.
Having visited several large sites (25,000 programs and above), I
firmly believe that this Y2K problem is real. And very, very scary.
TED |
